Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Data deduplication refers to the practice of using hashes or other semi-unique identifiers to identify portions of identical data and replacing those portions with pointers to a single stored master copy of the data portion. By collapsing such duplicated data into a single copy and pointers to that single copy, large and even substantial amounts of memory space may be freed. In network or cloud-based applications, deduplication may allow an operating system or application to be served as multiple instances to multiple customers while using about as much memory as a single instance of the operating system or application. As a result, a given amount of memory may serve substantially more customers when data deduplication is used compared to when data deduplication is not used.